Eric Lindner's book Tiger in the Sea: The Ditching of Flying Tiger 923 and the Desperate Struggle for Survival tells the story of pilot John Murray's 1962 lifesaving 'ditch' of an L-1049H Super Constellation in the North Atlantic Ocean. The barely controlled water landing with 76 passengers and crew members on board captivated the world at the height of the Cold War. Newspapers from London to Los Angeles ran breaking updates of the crash's aftermath, and President Kennedy received hourly updates concerning the fates of all involved.
Lindner conducted dozens of interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses to write Tiger in the Sea. His account is definitive, unearthing details and insights from Murray and others that reveal the full extent of the event's unprecedented danger, as well as Murray and his crew's miraculous airmanship and extraordinary ingenuity.
Here, read an exclusive adaptation from Tiger in the Sea.
As Flying Tiger 923 sliced through the dark sky over the Atlantic, a thousand miles from land on the way to Frankfurt from Newfoundland, a red flash on the instrument panel caught Captain John Murray's eye: fire in engine no. 3; inboard, right side. The 73-ton Lockheed 1049H Super Constellation had 76 people on board, but the 44-year-old pilot from Oyster Bay, Long Island, wasn't rattled. He'd survived back-to-back plane crashes as a flight instructor in Detroit, Egyptian anti-aircraft fire as a black ops freelancer, and several overwater engine failures as a commercial pilot. Murray knew the most likely explanation for the signal was a transient electrical malfunction - the aircraft's fire-detection system was notoriously finicky - but still, Murray was puzzled: There was no alarm bell to go along with the flash. His log books accounted for 20 years of fire warnings, but zero entries spoke of a transient flash without an accompanying alarm.
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